I’m finally back to writing again! I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about something that’s mentioned in a lot of video guides. This week, I’m going to explain: “How to make decisions in League of Legends”
People say that the difference between a Diamond and a Gold player is decision-making. This is true, everyone says this, but there’s no real explanation on how to make those decisions. I am hoping that this article will help you in doing so.
We’re going to be going through the actual core components of making a decision in League of Legends.
I’m gonna break this down into four parts:
- Foresight
- Risk and Reward
- Decisiveness
- Adaptation
FORESIGHT
Making a decision is easy. A decision is making a simple choice of acting on an idea or not, that isn’t the difficult part. The difficult thing is to have consistent and creative visualization for these ideas.
The only consistent way to train your brain to present you with these ideas is to practice thinking. I guarantee you that if you ask any successful person, they will all practice thinking. They would also visualize new ideas that keep them three steps ahead of their opponents. You need to learn to foresee things.
A Gold player that’s foreseeing trading with an enemy would think about these things:
Should I trade? Would I win the trade? What summoner spells would he use?
Based on their answers, they would decide whether to trade or not. Whereas a Challenger player would foresee things like this:
Should I trade? Would I win the trade? What summoner spells would he use? What’s my plan if ever I do lose the trade? What does he gain if he wins the trade? What could I do to prevent that from happening? Would he foresee my counterplay? How would I react if he counters my counterplay? Are there any other factors that I haven’t considered? Where is his jungler located? What would I gain from winning the trade? What would that advantage allow me to do later? Is there any immediate advantage from winning the trade?
Practicing and thinking about these will improve your intuition in producing those ideas.
At that moment, you would’ve gone from being a reactive player to a proactive player. That is the first step to make consistent game-changing decisions.
RISK AND REWARD
So you’ve got an idea and you can foresee what would happen, you’ll be needing those tools to assess Risk and Reward.
Risk and Reward is a quick system that you can use to determine whether an idea is worth acting on. If the reward is much higher than the risk, then generally it’s a good decision. Even if you lose, you know that you had the highest possible chances for success. Here’s an example:
Let’s say you get the idea of Roaming —
Risk: Not getting a kill, dying to the enemy, or losing CS (Creep Score).
Reward: Getting a kill, picking up an assist, helping out your ally laner.
At this point, the risk is not worth the reward. This is because getting a kill would be unlikely, but losing CS is almost guaranteed. But you know that being able to roam would be a good decision and it would help your team win the game.
What you need to do now is to reduce the risk. By pushing the minions into the enemy tower, you wouldn’t lose as much CS. By knowing the jungler is on the other side of the map, then you would reduce the risk of dying. By knowing that the enemy laner has no summoner spells, meaning they can’t escape, you have a good chance to get a kill.
By doing these things, you’ve reduced your risk and made roaming a much better decision.
DECISIVENESS
It’s pretty obvious that being decisive means making decisions, we all know how obvious that could be. But it also means not being afraid to make a decision and not lingering on a bad decision.
Lots of things in League of Legends aren’t straight-up good or bad. That’s why a quick decent decision could be better than a delayed great decision. This might cause you to miss the opportunity completely. This is why you should commit to that decent decision or whichever decision you do make.
Diamonds and Challengers don’t make the right decisions every time. In fact, they make quite a few sub-optimal calls. But when they do make that decision, they commit everything to it. The difference is how much you can commit to that decision.
Being indecisive is a huge mistake. If you want to steal their jungle camps, go and steal them. Get in there and give it your all. Don’t walk halfway there, start questioning yourself, and then turn around. This way you have wasted valuable time walking around achieving nothing. League of Legends is a game that’s won or lost in a matter of seconds.
ADAPTATION
Often times in solo queue, there will be more than one shotcaller on your team. This means it’s likely that players will decide on different things. It is better for five players to make a decent decision than it would be for your team to do different things.
Say that you’ve killed the majority of their team but they have a fed jungler that’s still alive. Should you get Baron Nashor, Dragon, or destroy an Inhibitor? Don’t mind it too much, go pick one and do it as a team. It doesn’t matter which decision is right — make a decision as a team and put your all into making that decision work.
You need to learn how to adapt to your team. You might know for a fact that your team isn’t making the correct or optimal choice. But they have a better chance of making that choice work with you than without you. Being able to adapt in-game is the type of higher-level thinking that helps players win more games.
That’s all for now! I hope you learned something from this article. Good luck on the Rift!
